Anna Caroline Oury

Who was Anna Caroline Oury?

Anna Caroline Oury was a German pianist and composer of French ancestry. Anna Caroline de Belleville-Oury was born in Landshut, Bavaria, Germany. She was the daughter of a French aristocrat who was the director of the national Court Opera in Mannheim. She studied with Czerny in Vienna between 1816 to 1820, where she met Beethoven and heard him improvise. In 1829 she traveled to Warsaw where Chopin heard her play impressively enough for him to write about it in a letter, praising her "excellent" playing for its lightness and elegance. Twelve years later, in 1841, Chopin dedicated his Waltz in F minor, Op. Posth. 70, No. 2, to Mme. Oury, though it went unpublished until 1855.

In July 1831 she made her London debut in Her Majesty’s Theatre with Niccolò Paganini and in October she married Antonio James Oury, a violinist at the King's Theatre in London and the two toured as a duo. They performed in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Russia between 1831 to 1839 before settling in England, excepting a concert tour of Italy in 1846-7. Working with her husband, she helped to create the Brighton Musical Union in 1847, a club for chamber music modeled after the London Musical Union. The remainder of Anna Caroline Oury's career was spent focusing on composition until her retirement in 1866, writing approximately 180 works for piano in this time. Oury died in Munich in 1880 at the age of 72.